"I'm not sure I can actually swallow from here," remarks the dragon.

"I'm nooot sure how to solve that without letting your head loose entirely."

"Which I suppose is out of the question."

"Yes. Sorry."

"Then I suppose I'll go on having this headache, won't I?"

Adana makes a helpless gesture. "I'm afraid so, I'm genuinely sorry."

"No doubt. How goes convincing your friends that I can be sent home?"

"They're worried that you are planning to retrieve your dragon friends and attack us again in the hopes that you could get rid of our ability to resurrect. Which - I don't think you could manage, but it's a legitimate concern."

"None of my friends are dragons."

"Okay, well, dragon acquaintances or children or family members or - whatever. You have a definite bin of monsters, we don't know how big that bin is, or how much trouble the things in it would be. That, basically."

"She has managed them all handily, her and her peryton assassin."

"... Peryton assassin? He's not an assassin."

"Did she kill all those people herself while chained up in an antimagic field?" wonders the dragon.

"Well. No. But that was after she was kidnapped, that's not assassinating people, that is rescuing his girlfriend from people who were torturing her. Although he was using murdery methods to do it, I'll give you that one."

"He would kill me now if she asked, I can tell that much."

"I didn't go after her from a vacuum, either. You cannot comprehend..." He shuts his eyes and sighs smokily.

"That's a bit insulting to my intelligence, isn't it? Or my experience. I willingly got myself into a situation where it was likely that I would be raped in order to save several hundred lives. I was threatened with a killswitch in my head and had the wonderful choice of 'set a demon on the instigator and not be able to control what he does at all' and 'probably die, unless she somehow managed to break me and make me do some really terrible things.' Which, as it turns out, didn't matter much, because I got myself shot in the head later. My brother died in prison. My dad took up becoming a drunk after my death. My mom's in an insane asylum. I get it. Terrible things happen, and you want more than anything to prevent them. Right?"

"But you have no experience with being the last dragon left alive, thinking the war that killed your entire family was over, and finding that you were wrong, that there is one left, that all your ancestors' paranoia in trying to track them down and make sure it was finished was for nothing because there is one and who can say how many more left."

"So obviously, their method didn't work. Tracking down sphinxes to make sure the war is 'finished' by torturing them for information and then killing them has managed to get people from another dimension pissed at you. It has made you the bad guy. Okay? So try some diplomacy, she is not her ancestors, she literally had zero desire to go after dragons before you started attacking her. Same with her boyfriend, I'm pretty sure that if left to their own devices their plan was 'learn and then teach magic' and possibly also 'figure out how to make medallions and then hand that knowledge to anyone that will listen.'"

"So I've been told," mutters the dragon, closing his eyes again.

"And I suppose that when she's got a litter of kits none of them will have the slightest inclination to pick up where their forebears left off, either? When she resurrects ancestors she has not met, they will peacefully reestablish the species without any interest in stamping out the last of the once-great race of the dragons?" he drawls.

"Why would her kids have any reason to go after dragons? Why would she resurrect people that want to murder innocent dragons for no other reason than their species?"